


Maelstrom

by Sticks



Category: Star Wars: New Jedi Order Era - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sticks/pseuds/Sticks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kyp's overconfidence had always been his weakness. AU during Rebel Stand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maelstrom

_Too much pressure and it would bend, becoming useless. Too little and nothing would happen. He had to find the right pressure to budge it, to set it into motion and keep it going that way..._

_For a moment, the only things in the universe were him, Jaina, and the void. He moved the void, turned it around, moved it back the other direction._

His overconfidence had always been his weakness.

When Kyp opened his eyes and saw that nothing had happened--no, worse than nothing, the exact opposite of what he’d intended to happen, precisely the thing he was trying to prevent--he realized what a fool he was. He moved the void, sure. A degree or maybe two off-course. And then the dovin basal moved back, and Kyp was reminded that the blasted things literally had minds of their own. He felt the void shift against the pressure he had applied. He felt it reach for him. He felt it miss.

And when Jaina screamed, he felt that too. Her comm was off but her panic filled his mind, contagious. He checked his display--she was still his wing. It was Jag’s clawcraft the void had found, his blip on the screen sliding slowly backward. 

Kyp resisted the urge to look over his shoulder; he couldn’t have seen it happen anyway. The one other friendly light on the board winked out. That, Kyp knew, was a mercy, quick and probably painless. The thought did not console him.

Through their bond, struggling against the current of her rage, Kyp seized Jaina’s hands on the stick and turned her X-wing. _I’ll point. You shoot._ It was a command she was more than willing to follow--the lines of laser fire that left her S-foils were nearly as solid as a lightsaber blade. As he steered them down a tortuous path, running only on adrenaline now, she tore through the coralskippers and grutchins in their way, and the heat of her fury never lessened.

He didn’t remember reaching the edge of the battle, or the jump back, or the trip down to the surface of Borleias. Suddenly his X-wing was in the hangar, and he felt old and heavy. It took ages to climb down from the cockpit, and the crews around him kept their distance. He realized Jaina had already gone, and noticed an upended cart of supplies near her fighter. She must have terrified them. The wrath of the Goddess.

There was no debriefing. Kyp moved, staggering a little, to the turbolift and took it to the fifth level. At the door to Jaina’s quarters he stopped to catch his breath. Sith, he was tired, but this day wasn’t over. He passed his hand over the entrance panel, ready to force the locking mechanism, but it wasn’t engaged. The door slid open and he stepped inside.

She was sitting in the dark at her desk, knees drawn up to her chest. Her hair was down and her flightsuit open to her waist, as if she was preparing to take a sanisteam before she got distracted. Her fingers moved on their own, worrying at something invisible, and he wondered what tangible bit of Jag she wished she was holding. An insignia, or a piece of the red piping from his uniform. He wondered if he should go back down a few levels, stop by Fel’s room, and get something she could keep in remembrance. _Looting a dead man’s things, Durron? Classy._ But he’d do it for her.

That thought disappeared the instant she realized he was in the room. She was closed to him, her shields up, but her eyes showed him what he’d find in her. In nearly two decades of being the galaxy’s most reviled man, he had never been on the receiving end of that much hatred. Fine, let her hate him; he could live with that. He’d earned it, many times over. And it was better for her to direct that hate toward him than to let it seethe in her until she detonated.

It was what he’d seen before that moment, the glimpse of her holding something that wasn’t there, that made him cross the space between them and put out his hand. That brokenness was still in her, though she hid it now. He touched her arm, said her name.

The air crackled.

He was nearly too slow, his reflexes dampened by fatigue, but Kyp caught the arc of electricity as it coursed up her arm, and let it disperse into the air. _That was stupid, girl. A kriffing stupid thing to do, no matter how much you hurt._ He was weaker than he’d thought, that was true, but he was still stronger than her, and now he was angry, too. He brought his free hand over and grasped her jaw, forced her to look up at him. Her eyes blazed, challenging him. From nowhere a breeze picked up--the first breath of a whirlwind--and he felt her start to summon more lightning, so he stifled her like a shroud on a fire. She fought, as he knew she would, so he pressed harder, his power over hers. Neither of them moved, but it was still a sort of violence. Through clenched teeth he said, “Stop. It. _Now_.”

At last she gave way, the wind died, and the look in her eyes made him reel back. She wasn’t just subdued--she was scared. He’d taken it too far, crossed a threshold he’d never even encountered before. Jaina Solo was afraid of him. 

He stepped back, his hands spread placatingly. She watched his retreat, eyes wide, and her fingers began to twitch again of their own accord. After a moment she seemed to no longer see him, and that was when he knew he couldn’t leave that room. Not that night, not until she slept. He had no idea what she might do if left alone. His back hit the door and he reached out a weary hand, coupling the lock and deactivating the buzzer unit in one motion. Then he let himself slide down to the floor.

It seemed like a good idea to talk, so he did. He began with minutiae, the petty problems of Kyp Durron. One of his X-wing’s landing struts had been bent an infinitesimal amount somehow during patrols last week, and the techs in the hanger didn’t believe him until Zero-One confirmed it that the fuselage was tilted a fraction of a degree. His refresher unit was malfunctioning, too. He was starting to suspect a prankster in the squadron, but couldn’t figure out who it was. 

He was tinkering with his lightsaber in the evenings, trying to rig it to emit at a frequency that would cancel out a vonduun crab’s protective field. He needed new boots, but he always bought from a designer on Coruscant, so that was out. Borleias was too much like Yavin IV for his liking; the bugs thought he tasted great. And so on, until he ran out of things to say and started thinking at her instead.

Her shields were still blocking their bond, but he knew she could hear him, so he told her how sorry he was. For everything. He was sorry for Sernpidal, for lying, for using her. He went back further--he was sorry for what he did to her uncle nearly twenty years ago, sorry for letting her father defend him, sorry about the mess he left for the rest of the galaxy to clean up. He was sorry for things that weren’t his fault: Anakin and Jacen. 

And most of all he was sorry for Jag. Sorry he’d let her think he had it under control, that he could save Fel. Sorry he was so sure of his own strength, so foolhardy. Sorry that such a great pilot, who would have become a great leader one day, who would have become something more to Jaina, was no longer with them because of him. _He died for you, Goddess. He made that choice, which was no choice at all. He did that so you could go on fighting, so you can’t give up. You can’t give up._

Sometime during all of that he had closed his eyes. Sometime tears had started to leak out. Stang, he was tired. He reached up to swipe at his eyes, but a small hand caught his. He felt warm, soft lips on his own, there and gone, swift and chaste. He opened his eyes and she was staring back, inches away, with no fear. “What was that for?” he asked when he found his voice again. 

“For trying,” Jaina said, and mustered a small, sad smile. _I forgive you_ , she told him silently. 

He was sure it would be a bad idea to kiss her again, and he did it anyway. There was nothing chaste about it. She was surprised for a nanosecond, but recovered quickly and returned his fervor. He moved his hands, then stopped, asked her a wordless question. _Yes_ , she told him, it was all right. _Yes_ , she wanted this. 

_Yes_. She kept saying it, so who was he to say no?

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I stole the title from a Battlestar Galactica episode featuring the death of my other favorite fighter pilot, Kara Thrace.


End file.
